Review of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) by Potatoes351 — 23 Nov 2015

Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy has so far been entertaining yet a disappointment in comparison to it's Lord of the Rings bigger brothers. However after a promising final act in the Desolation of Smaug things were looking up for The Battle of the Five Armies...luckily that pulled through.

The Battle of the Five Armies takes place immediately after the events of the Desolation of Smaug, beginning as Smaug reaches Laketown. As Bilbo (Martin Freeman) the dwarves retake the city of Erebor in the Lonely Mountain, war is on the horizon as Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) becomes blind with wealth and power; the citizens of Laketown are left without a home; the woodland elves seek a treasure stolen from them and the Orc's led by Azog the defiler (Manu Bennett) want to claim Erebor to give them an upper hand in the coming age of the Orc.

The majority of the film is action sequences, beginning with Smaug's destruction of Laketown and culminating in the titular battle of the five armies. As such the pacing for the film is much faster than that of any of the previous Middle Earth films, allowing much less room for downtime and filler. The shorter runtime also lends in it's favour as the Hobbit films thusfar have been rather bloated with relatively pointless and at times boring sequences with little relevance to the actual plot.

My biggest problem with the two previous Hobbit films is the overuse of some shoddy CGI effects, BoFA does improve it's CG quality somewhat but ultimately pays the price again by literally swamping the film in CGI, particularly the opening sequence and the entire five armies battle. The CGI is so excessive in the film that it even produces frame rate stutter, something relatively unseen in the film industry but something extremely common in the video games industry. This could be due to the use of 48FPS over industry standard 28, but whatever the reason it does lower the quality of the film.

That being said this is the best Hobbit film in the trilogy, what it lacks in particular defining moments (such as AUJ's Gollum scene & Dos' Smaug scenes) it makes up for in scale, pacing and a very satisfying and brutal battle sequence that lasts most of the films second half; the biggest in Peter Jackson's Middle Earth films to date.

A fitting farewell to Middle Earth, Bilbo, Gandalf and the rest of the characters we have come to know and love over the past 13 years and despite it's faults an extremely enjoyable film.